MIAMI – Patrick Ewing was heroic yesterday, but he is slowly falling apart. He came up with another serious injury in the third quarter to go along with his aching Achilles, hurting his right side, but played through the pain and finished with a team-high 22 pointsand 11 rebounds and stopped Alonzo Mourning on a critical Georgetown faceoff with 1:20 to go in the Knicks’ 78-77 win over the Heat.

“I pulled a muscle or broke some ribs,” Ewing said. “Because of my leg I have an imbalance.”

The injury also could be cartilage torn away from the ribs. More will be known today when tests are taken. The injury occurred when Ewing went around P.J. Brown for an awkward third-quarter layup.

“Mr. Body Breakdown Man came through,” Jeff Van Gundy said of Ewing. Ewing also hit two key free throws down the stretch. “I have the utmost respect for Patrick,” Chris Childs said. “It moves me just him being hurt; people don’t understand the weight that he has to put on his knees and his Achilles, it’s unbearable.

“He comes to practice early. He gets treatment. He works on his game. A lot of people would just sit out. You would have to take a stun gun or whatever and shoot him to get him off that court. He’s going to leave it all out there. He just came up so big for us tonight. I love him as a person and as a teammate.” *Tim Hardaway thought about going to double and help on Allan Houston’s game-winning shot. “I should have but I didn’t want Charlie Ward to go free,” Hardaway said. “Looking back, I should have gone to stop [Houston] from penetrating.” … General consensus in the Heat locker room toward the Knicks’ chances of real advancement summed up best by Voshon Lenard: “I don’t give a damn about the Knicks.” … Heat bench, such a potent force in the series, was badly outscored, 25-12, yesterday. *Many wanted to know about the Heat for next year. Will they be broken up? “I don’t concern myself with that, go ask Coach Riley,” Brown said.

OK. Coach Riley? “I’m into building, not blaming, and obviously I’ll sit down and give it some great thought,” Riley said. “I think everybody knows we have a good team. We just have to figure a way to sort of get past our problems.”

Brown on the series: “I don’t think the better team won. They just played harder than us in the series.”